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Your point about CapitalOne, Volkswagen Credit, and your university sending you money with Routing Number and Account Number is just fine. You have a relationsh

by pjg 10y ago

Your point about CapitalOne, Volkswagen Credit, and your university sending you money with Routing Number and Account Number is just fine. You have a relationship with them. Try sending ACH to your landlord or your Gardner or DMV. Or that class action settlement Check you received - why didn't they just ACH it to you ? In the former case - entities don't want to give out financial info to people they don't know. Even if they do how do you plan to initiate an ACH to your Landlord ? In the latter i.e. a business or an individual trying to pay you must go through an extensive process to collect your bank account info, that's assuming you are willing to part with it.Donald Knuth doesn't write Checks for this reason: http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/news08.html http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/news08.html About ACH not being ubiquitous. Try ACH'ing from/to your Money Market account. There are over 100 million of them in the US. It won't work. Small Banks and Credit Unions - yes appx 12% of Credit Unions are not ACH enabled (stats are behind the NCUA firewall ). Just because large banks in large metros use ACH ubiquitously does not imply universality. But regardless that's just one point for one demographic. The big picture is getting payments without sharing bank info. About your point about CapitalOne and Comcast not processing a Check as Check - that has been around for decades. Truncating a paper Check to ACH transaction to get rid of paper. We are going one step further. Not generating paper Check to begin with. If there is no paper Check there is no need to convert (i.e. truncate in bankers parlance) to ACH i.e. saves another step in the process and makes it more efficient This is not about non-ACH banks, its about getting rid of 3 day ACH delay and building an experience where anyone can send a payment to anyone else without signing up, without going thru the cumbersome bank UI/UX, without sharing their bank account info and have it delivered in their mailbox. Free for individuals (up to 25 Checks) and businesses pay $1/Check.

superuser2 10y ago
>without sharing their bank account info You should probably lead with this, because it wasn't clear until you stated it there. The parent comment made it sound like the problem you're solving is inability to just use people's self-reported account numbers in ACH without a verification process. This seemed strange, because companies do that already. Doing something like ACH, but without leaking either party's account number to the other, is more interesting. Regarding landlords, the property management company that owns most of my neighborhood asks for checking account/routing numbers from a web portal, just like CapitalOne and VW. The DMV dictates the forms of payment it will accept; it's not up to the customer to pick a payment service. They need a check or credit card in hand at the counter. I dunno about gardeners. If it were informal enough, I'd probably use Venmo. I'm not sure why asking him to give Checkbook the necessary information to actually remit the payment is any different from asking him to sign up for Venmo. (Maybe it is?) >its about getting rid of 3 day ACH delay For the companies I mentioned, the payment is always credited to my bill (and taken from my bank account) the next morning. I only experience the 3-day delay using the "transfer between linked accounts" features at my banks. I've read elsewhere that this delay is introduced by the banks as an anti-fraud mechanism, not an actual technical limitation. If I pay someone using, say, Venmo, if they immediately hit "cashout" they will have the money in their bank the next day.

by pjg 10y ago

superuser2 10y ago

>without sharing their bank account info You should probably lead with this, because it wasn't clear until you stated it there. The parent comment made it sound like the problem you're solving is inability to just use people's self-reported account numbers in ACH without a verification process. This seemed strange, because companies do that already. Doing something like ACH, but without leaking either party's account number to the other, is more interesting. Regarding landlords, the property management company that owns most of my neighborhood asks for checking account/routing numbers from a web portal, just like CapitalOne and VW. The DMV dictates the forms of payment it will accept; it's not up to the customer to pick a payment service. They need a check or credit card in hand at the counter. I dunno about gardeners. If it were informal enough, I'd probably use Venmo. I'm not sure why asking him to give Checkbook the necessary information to actually remit the payment is any different from asking him to sign up for Venmo. (Maybe it is?) >its about getting rid of 3 day ACH delay For the companies I mentioned, the payment is always credited to my bill (and taken from my bank account) the next morning. I only experience the 3-day delay using the "transfer between linked accounts" features at my banks. I've read elsewhere that this delay is introduced by the banks as an anti-fraud mechanism, not an actual technical limitation. If I pay someone using, say, Venmo, if they immediately hit "cashout" they will have the money in their bank the next day.